Loading the Canon

TLDR: In the last decade, the canon has become a major academic growth industry as mentioned in this paper and hardly a critic or theorist of note has failed to pronounce on the implications positive or negative of the nature of canons and the processes of canonization.

Abstract: Loading, not to say firing, the canon has become a major academic growth industry in the last decade: hardly a critic or theorist of note has failed to pronounce on the implications positive or negative of the nature of canons and the processes of canonization. At the risk of over-using the obvious pun, this industry has been fuelled by a variety of challenges to humanistic assumptions of the universality and timelessness of 'great art,' challenges launched by the rise of theory in general and of critiques based on gender, race, and class in particular. After a dozen years of discussion, perhaps the time has now come to assess both the terms of the debate itself and its multi pIe consequences. The seeming innocence of the idea of the canon as a set of texts having the authority of 'perennial classics'1 has been challenged. If, instead, the canon is seen as a 'body of texts which best performs in the sphere of culture the work of legitimating the prevailing social order' and if entry to such a canon is determined by conformity (and I deliberately use a 'loaded' term here) to some dominant political ideology, the recent media coverage of the 'political correctness' debates raises the stakes of the debate considerably for us in the academy, faced as we are not only with challenges to the notion of canonicity but also with the formation of new canons reflecting new cultural dominants. The danger, as Edward Said has noted, is that new canons can (though need not) mean 'a new history and, less happily, a new parochialism.'2 In the continuing attempt to articulate 'a new history' for the discipline of literary studies, it is incumbent upon us all to avoid the rather too tempting trap of 'a new parochialism.' One of the ways of side-stepping such a trap would be to examine what the process of canonization entails in alternative as well as mainstream canons and to study the complexity of both the seemingly simultaneous need for and suspicion of canoniZing. Both books under review here do this, though in very different ways,